Genuine Lies (16 page)

Fifteen minutes later Travers opened the door of the main house. Studying the woman’s set, dissatisfied face and paunchy build, Julia wondered how she could have attracted the same man as the stunning, statuesque Eve.

“In the gym,” Travers muttered.

“Excuse me?”

“In the gym,” she repeated, and led the way in her reluctant style. She turned into the east wing and headed down a corridor with many intricate wall niches, each filled with an Erte statue. To the right was a wide arched window that opened onto the central courtyard, where Julia saw the gardener, Wayfarers and headphones in place, delicately clipping the topiary.

At the end of the hall were thick double doors painted a bold teal. Travers didn’t knock, but swung one open. Immediately the hallway was filled with bright, bouncy music and Eve’s steady curses.

Julia would never have called the room by the lowly name
gym.
Despite the weight equipment, the slant boards, the mirrored wall and ballet barre, it was elegant. An exercise palace, perhaps, Julia mused, studying the high ceiling painted with streamlined art deco figures. Light broke through a trio of stained glass skylights in refracting, rainbow colors. Not a palace, Julia corrected herself. A temple erected to worship the smug-faced god of sweat.

The floor was a glossily polished parquet, and a gleaming smoked-glass wet bar, complete with refrigerator and microwave, took up another wall. Music cartwheeled out of a high-tech stereo system flanked by potted begonias and towering ficus trees.

Standing beside Eve as she lay on a weight bench doing leg curls was Mr. Muscle. Temporarily mesmerized, Julia let out a long breath as she looked at him. He had to be nearly seven feet—a Nordic god whose bronze body bulged out of an incredibly brief unitard. The single white band stretched low on his gleaming chest, snaked down his hips, rode high and tight over a very muscular set of buns.

His golden blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, his ice-blue eyes smiling approval as Eve’s curses turned the air a deeper, much hotter blue.

“Fuck this, Fritz.”

“Five more, my beautiful flower,” he said in precise, musical English that had images of cool lakes and mountain streams dancing in Julia’s mind.

“You’re killing me.”

“I make you strong.” As she huffed her way through the last of the curls, he laid a huge hand on her thigh and squeezed. “You have the muscle tone of a thirty-year-old.” Then he gave her bottom an intimate little rub.

Dripping sweat, Eve collapsed. “If I ever walk again, I’m going to kick you right in your enormous crotch.”

He laughed, patted her again, then grinned over at Julia. “Hello.”

Barely, she managed to swallow. Eve’s last comment had lured Julia’s gaze down so that she’d seen for herself the
adjective hadn’t been an exaggeration. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to interrupt.”

Eve managed to open her eyes. If she’d had the energy, she would have chuckled. Most women got that slack-jawed, dazed look after their first load of Fritz. She was glad Julia wasn’t immune. “Thank God. Travers, pour me something very cold—and put some arsenic in it for my friend here.”

Fritz laughed again, a deep, cheerful sound that bounded easily over Eve’s creative curses. “You drink a little, then we work on your arms. You don’t want the skin hanging down like turkey’s.”

“I can come back,” Julia began as Eve turned over. “No, stay. He’s almost through torturing me. Aren’t you, Fritz?”

“Almost done.” He took the drink Travers offered and downed it in one gulp before she had shuffled out the door. While Eve mopped her face with a towel, he studied Julia. The look in his eyes made her uneasy. Brandon’s took on the same light when he was offered a nice, pliant lump of modeling clay. “You have good legs. You work out?”

“Well, no.” A dastardly admonition in southern California, she realized. People had been hanged for less. She was wondering if she should apologize, when he crossed to her and began to feel her arms. “Hey, look—”

“Skinny arms.” Her mouth fell open when he ran his hands over her stomach. “Good abs. We can fix you up.”

“Thank you.” He had fingers like rods of iron, and she didn’t want to rile him. “But I really don’t have time.”

“You must make time for your body,” he said so seriously, she swallowed the nervous laugh. “You come on Monday, I start you off.”

“I really don’t think—”

“An excellent idea,” Eve put in. “I hate to be tortured alone.” She grimaced as Fritz set the weights on the Nautilus for her arm work. “Have a seat, Julia. You can talk to me and take my mind off my misery.”

“Monday, my ass,” Julia muttered.

“I beg your pardon?”

She smiled as Eve got in the next position for pain. “I said I wonder if the weather will last.”

Eve, who had heard her very well the first time, merely lifted a brow. “That’s what I thought you said.” Once she was settled, Eve took a cleansing breath and began to pull the weights toward the center of her body, and out. “You enjoyed yourself last night?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“So polite.” She shot a grin at Fritz. “She wouldn’t swear at you.”

Julia watched Eve’s muscles bunch and strain. Sweat was popping out again. “Oh yes I would.”

Eve laughed even as the effort slicked wet down her flesh. “You know the trouble with being beautiful, Julia? Everyone notices the least little flaw—they relish finding them. So you have to maintain.” Straining at the tense and flow of her own muscles, she sucked in air and puffed it out. “Like a religion. I’m determined to do the best I can for the body God and the surgeons have given me. And not give anyone the satisfaction of saying she was beautiful—once.” She broke off to swear for a moment while her arms throbbed. “Some people claim to be addicted to this. I can only think they’re very, very sick. How many more?” she asked Fritz.

“Twenty.”

“Bastard.” But she didn’t slacken pace. “What are your impressions from last night?”

“That a very high percentage of the people there cared as much about the charity as they did the publicity. That new Hollywood will never have quite the same class as old Hollywood. And that Anthony Kincade is an unpleasant and potentially dangerous man.”

“I wondered if you’d be easily dazzled. Apparently not. How many more, you son of a bitch?”

“Five.”

Eve swore her way through them, panting like a woman in the last throes of childbirth. The more vicious her oaths, the wider Fritz’s grin. “Wait here,” she ordered Julia, then groaned to her feet and disappeared through a door.

“She is a lovely woman,” Fritz commented. “Strong.”

“Yes.” But when she tried to imagine herself pumping iron as she cruised toward seventy, Julia shuddered. She’d damn well take her flab and like it. “You don’t think all this might be too much, considering her age?”

He lifted a brow as he glanced toward the door where Eve had gone. He knew if she had heard that, she would do a great deal more than swear. “For someone else, yes. Not for Eve. I am a personal trainer. This program is for her body, for her mind. For her spirit. All three are strong.” He moved toward one of the windows. Beside it was a massage table and a shelf cluttered with oils and lotions. “For you I design something different.”

That was a subject she wanted to veer away from. And quickly. “How long have you been her personal trainer?”

“Five years.” After choosing his oils, he used the remote to change the music. Now it was classical, soothing strings. “She has brought me many clients. But if I had only one, I would want Eve.”

He said her name almost reverently. “She inspires loyalty.”

“She is a great lady.” He passed a tiny bottle under his nose and reminded Julia of the bull, Ferdinand, smelling flowers. “You’re writing her book.”

“Yes, I am.”

“You be sure to say she is a great lady.”

Eve came back in, wrapped in a short white robe, her hair damp, her face pink and glowing. Without a word she walked over to the table, stripped as carelessly as a child, and stretched out on her stomach. Fritz draped a sheet modestly over her hips and went to work.

“After hell comes heaven.” Eve sighed. She propped her chin on her fists and her eyes glowed into Julia’s. “You may want to include that I put myself through this hideous business three times a week. And while I hate every minute of it, I know it’s kept my body looking good enough that Nina has to turn down an annual offer from
Playboy
, and my endurance up so that I can endure a ten- or twelve-hour shoot without collapsing.
In fact, I’m stealing Fritz away when I go to Georgia on location. The man has the best hands on five continents.”

He blushed like a boy at the compliment.

While Fritz used those hands to knead and relax Eve’s muscles, Julia centered the conversation on health, exercise, and daily routine. She waited, patient, while Eve slipped back into her robe and exchanged a very warm, very intimate kiss with her trainer. Julia thought of the scene she’d witnessed in the garden and wondered how a woman so obviously in love with one man could flirt so blatantly with another.

“Monday,” he said with a nod at Julia as he tugged on sweats. “I start your program.”

“She’ll be here,” Eve promised before Julia could politely decline. She was grinning as Fritz hefted his gym bag and strode out the door. “Consider it part of your research,” Eve advised. “Well, what did you think of him?”

“Was I drooling?”

“Only a little.” Eve flexed her limbered muscles, then slipped a pack of cigarettes from her robe pocket. “Christ, I’m dying for one of these. I don’t have the heart—or maybe it’s the nerve—to smoke around Fritz. Fix us another drink, will you? Heavy on the champagne in mine.”

While Julia rose to obey, Eve took a deep, hungry drag. “I can’t think of another man in the world I’d give these up for, even for a few hours.” She blew out another stream of smoke as Julia offered a glass. Her laugh was quick and rich, as if at a private joke. “The longer I know you, the easier you are to read, Julia. Right now you’re struggling not to be judgmental, wondering how I justify an affair with a man young enough to be my son.”

“It’s not my job to be judgmental.”

“No, it’s not, and you’re bound and determined to do your job. Just for the record, I wouldn’t attempt to justify it, but merely to enjoy it. As it happens, I’m not having an affair with that fabulous slice of beefcake, because he’s quite obstinately gay.” She laughed and sipped again. “Now you’re shocked and telling yourself not to be.”

Uncomfortable, Julia shifted and sipped her own drink.

“The purpose of this is for me to explore your feelings, not for you to explore mine.”

“It works both ways.” Eve slipped off the table to curl like a cat into a deeply cushioned rattan chair. Every movement was sinuously feminine, seductive. It occurred to Julia that young Betty Berenski had chosen her name well. She was all woman—as ageless and mysterious as the first. “Before this book is finished, you and I will know each other as well as two people are able to. More intimately than lovers, more completely than parent and child. As we come to trust each other, you’ll understand the purpose.”

To put things back on the level she preferred, Julia took out her recorder and pad. “What reason would I have not to trust you?”

Eve smiled through a veil of smoke. Secrets, ripe as plums for picking, glistened in her eyes. “What reason indeed? Go ahead, Julia, ask the questions that are buzzing around in that head of yours. I’m in the mood to answer them.”

“Anthony Kincade. Why don’t you tell me how you came to marry him, and how his second wife went from making B movies to working as your housekeeper?”

Rather than answering, Eve smoked and considered. “You’ve been questioning CeeCee.”

There was a trace of annoyance in the statement, enough to give Julia a tug of satisfaction. Maybe they would reach a level of trust and intimacy, but it would be on equal terms. “Talking to her, certainly. If there was something you didn’t want her to tell me, you neglected to mention it to her.” When Eve remained silent, Julia tapped her pencil on her pad. “She commented this morning that she’d often spent time here as a child, visiting her Aunt Dottie. Naturally, it came out who Aunt Dottie was.”

“And you took it from there.”

“It’s my job to follow up information,” Julia said mildly, not only registering the growing irritation, but relishing it. Petty perhaps, she reflected, but satisfying to know that she’d finally chipped under that glossy guard.

“You had only to ask me.”

“That’s precisely what I’m doing now.” Julia tilted her head, and the angle was as much a challenge as a pair of raised fists. “If you wanted to keep secrets, Eve, you chose the wrong biographer. I don’t work with blinders on.”

“It’s my story.” Eve’s eyes sliced like twin green scythes. Julia felt the keen edge and refused to dodge.

“Yes, it is. And by your own choice, it’s mine too.” She had her teeth into it now, her jaws snapped tight, like a wolf’s over a fleshy bone. Her will rose up to tangle with Eve’s, muscles flexed. Nerves smoldered like bright embers in her stomach. “If you want someone who’ll bow when you pull the strings, we’ll stop this now. I’ll go back to Connecticut and we’ll let our lawyers hash it out.” She started to rise.

“Sit down.” Eve’s voice quivered with temper. “Sit down, dammit. You made your point.”

With an acknowledging nod, Julia settled again. Surreptitiously she slipped a hand into her pocket and thumbed free a Tums from its roll. “I’d prefer to make yours, but that won’t be possible if you block me whenever I touch on something that discomfits you.”

Eve was silent a moment, silent while temper faded into grudging respect. “I’ve lived a long time,” she said at length. “I’m used to doing things my own way. We’ll see, Julia, we’ll see if we can find a way to merge your way with mine.”

“Fair enough.” She slipped the tablet onto her tongue, hoping that it and the small victory would soothe her jittery stomach.

Eve lifted the glass to her lips, sipped, and prepared to open a long-locked and rusted door. “Tell me what you know.”

“It was simple enough to check out the fact that Dorothy Travers was Kincade’s second wife, whom he divorced only months before marrying you. I couldn’t quite place her at first, but I’ve remembered she made a dozen or so Bs in the fifties. Gothics and horror films mostly, until she dropped out of sight. I can only assume now, to work for you.”